Quirky game console is cheap and fun, but buggy and inconsistent

For every Prada, there's a Gap. For every Four Seasons, there's a Holiday Inn Express. For every Lamborghini, there's a Corolla.

For every Prada, there’s a Gap. For every Four Seasons, there’s a Holiday Inn Express. For every Lamborghini, there’s a Corolla.

Why shouldn’t the same logic apply to video game consoles?

The aging Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles cost $200 and $270. Their successors, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, will cost $500 and $400 when they arrive this holiday season. But do all game fans truly need the raw, hulking power of a mainframe computer sitting beside their TV screens?

Maybe that’s why a scrappy team of game designers decided to create the Gap of game consoles: the Ouya ($100). It began life as a project on Kickstarter, the site where inventors ask the public to help finance their pet projects in exchange for little more than a sense of participation; eager gamers kicked in more than $8.5 million.

They were rewarded by delays, bugs and frustration. But now, at last, the Ouya (pronounced OOH-yah) is a real product for sale in real stores, at least where it’s not sold out.

What you get for your $100 is a plastic black cube, about 3 inches on a side, and a standard cordless Xbox-style controller. The size is a virtue; you can shove your cube into a coat pocket and head over to a friend’s house or a hotel room. Don’t try that with an Xbox.

The cube runs a version of Android, Google’s phone software. That’s no coincidence; its guts are about what you’d find in a phone or tablet.

It connects to your television with a single HDMI cable. The controller’s top panels pop off magnetically so that you can insert an AA battery into each leg.

When you turn everything on, instructions on the TV guide you through “pairing” the controller with the cube. Then you’re asked to help it onto your home Wi-Fi network. Finally, you’re treated to a long update process, as the Ouya downloads the latest software.

Every game is free to try. Some are free forever. Some are free to play for an hour and then require payment (usually $5 to $20). Some let you play only the beginning levels until you pay.

Here’s the thing with Ouya games: You won’t mistake them for Xbox or PlayStation games. Many are terrible. Some are adapted from phone games. Some have jagged, bitmapped graphics like video games from 20 years ago. Some look like Wii games; some, like “Vector” (a parkour simulation, the acrobatic urban running sport), have a great stylized look. But the games rarely approach the movielike realism of the best Big-Name Console games. There’s nothing like Halo or Call of Duty on this thing.

However, the 200 available games have charms of their own. They’re indie. They’re alternative. Some are goofy and hilarious. But here’s a big deal: This box is open-source and hackable. Already, a not-so-secret society of tinkerers has written emulators — that is, software impersonation modules — that can turn the Ouya into a Nintendo DS, PlayStation 1, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, Genesis and other old consoles. If you can find games for them online (the fuzzy legal ramifications don’t seem to stop anyone), you can load them onto the Ouya on a flash drive or from a computer and play them. Try that, Sonyheads!

You can connect up to four controllers to play other people at parties, which is fun. But you can’t play against people online, and there’s no leaderboard to keep track of your scores and achievements.

There seems to be only one way to peruse the catalog: scroll through screens full of game icons. There are no descriptions, no prices, no ratings, no master alphabetical list. It’s a problem.

Unfortunately, the lack of polish evidenced in the motley game catalog also extends to the console itself. In its early public-testing days, the Ouya was notorious for bugginess. The sound would stop, the screen would go black, the console would lose its pairing with the controller.

The retail version (the one sold in stores) is much better, but still buggy. It still requires reminding of its controller pairing at each startup, for example.

It would also be nice if the Ouya had apps for services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video and HBO Go, like most set-top boxes these days. (There are a couple of lesser ones, like Flixster and TuneIn.)

Ouya’s best feature is that it lives in Quirksville. The box, the people who make games for it and the people who buy it will find themselves delightfully unencumbered by the red tape, bureaucracy and corporate conservativeness that weigh down bigger-name consoles. All kinds of fascinating, funny, oddball games emerge as a result — and all are free to try.

But the Ouya’s worst feature is also that it lives in Quirksville. The game quality varies wildly, and there’s no corporate screening at all. The company crowdsources new games — puts them into a category called Sandbox, where Ouya fans can try them and promote the best games into the “ real” catalog. But there’s still a lot of chaff around the wheat.

So yes, the company will spend the coming months running around stomping bugs, and game creators need time to dream up more offbeat winners. But already, Ouya is different, and entertaining, and portable, and open-source. And eminently entertaining and playable.

Even at this, its never “finished” stage, it’s worth $100, especially if you don’t already own one of the more expensive consoles. Yes, ladies and gentlemen: The Corolla of game consoles has just pulled up.